This session will introduce the course, with a special focus on the history and legacy of the ‘Birmingham school’ of cultural studies. After introducing cultural studies and the ‘cultural turn’ in social science, we focus on feminist politics and interventions in cultural studies, and link them to other paradigm shifts in social and cultural research. Staged as a ‘conversation’ between Anne-Marie Fortier and Maureen McNeil, we will travel through generations of feminist cultural studies – ‘where we’re from’, ‘where we’re at’, and where feminist cultural studies might go. We will identify some key themes and issues in the history of feminist cultural studies. We will also draw from our own work as illustrations of cultural studies research.

Fortier, Anne-Marie (1996) ‘Troubles in the Field. The Use of Personal Experiences as Sources of Knowledge’, Critique of Anthropology 16(3): 303-323. Reprinted in a slightly amended version in (1998) ‘Gender, ethnicity and fieldwork: a case study’, in C. Seale (ed.), Researching society and culture. London, Sage: 48-57.

Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, Treichler, Paula A. (Eds) (1992) Cultural Studies: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge.Hall, Stuart (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, London & New York : Verso

This session will look at digital feminist activisms, to explore how activists are using social media to challenge cultures of violence. We will focus on two main areas of feminist campaigning: feminist responses to online trolling, and global feminist campaigns against sexual violence, with particular reference to Indian feminism. We will use this to reflect on our own experience as feminists, and to think about the ways in which digital media makes new forms of organisation possible, but also involves its own forms of oppression.

The Women’s Health Movement has challenged the biomedicalisation of women’s bodies, collating and sharing women’s experiences of health and illness. As we consider the history of the Movement we will reflect upon how feminist activists have negotiated new relationships with biomedical professionals, the pharmaceutical industry, scientists and other activists.

Our case study will be breast cancer activism. We will look at how activists changed the experience of being diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer through cultural practices including art, lobbying, fund raising and awareness campaigns. We will watch a film, Pink Ribbon Inc., about the commercialisation of the pink ribbon and discuss the neo-liberal capture of feminist health politics.

This session will focus on anti-drone and anti-war activism, but seeks to draw out also these activisms in relationship to broader wars against the Other. How can feminist analysis help us to understand the integrated circuits of remotely-controlled warfare and border controls? What are the generative possibilities for combining street protests and other forms of resistance at the borders and from below, with journal publication in projects of social transformation? Drawing from indicative cases of activism informed by feminist theory and practice, this session will examine diverse modes of intervention into contemporary regimes of militarism ‘abroad’ and border enforcement ‘at home’.

This week we will consider feminist art and art activism and its central role in feminist movements. What can art activism achieve?

Rosemary will begin with a talk about feminist art activism/ body art from the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. Imogen will focus on art that directly engages with sexual violence and rape culture. The material we will consider in this session is upsetting and sometimes graphic. Despite the difficulty with working through this material, the aim of the session is to explore and examine an incredibly rich and important feminist archive. The material produced by feminist artists and activists as they have sought to directly intervene in social myths about sexual violence and rape for over 40 years.

In 2002, in an essay titled ‘Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape’ Carine M. Mardorossian argued that ‘Sexual violence has become the taboo subject of feminist theory today’. What Mardorissian claimed is that issues of sexual violence had become relegated to empirical social science, whilst feminist theoretical work on culture, visual culture and aesthetics had become increasingly detached from lived experiences of sexual violence, focusing on ‘more ambivalent expressions of male domination such as pornography and sexual harassment’. ‘Rape’ she concludes, ‘has become academia’s undertheorized and apparently untheorizable issue’. This session examines and troubles this claim through a focus on feminist art activism around sexual violence and rape produced over almost forty years, and in doing tracks a resurgence in anti-rape activism, which has accompanied a seeming intensification and proliferation of ‘rape culture’ within popular culture and the public sphere.

Artists work we will consider includes: Ana Mendieta, Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, Sue Williams, Nancy Spero, Kiera Faber, Nan Goldin, Donna Ferrato, The Guerrilla Girls, Girls, Emma Sulkowicz, Christen Clifford, art projects include ‘Myths of Rape’ (1977/2012) and activist projects such as the clothes line project, slutwalks and protests against the proliferation of “popular cultures of rape” through to online activism such as @countdeadwomen and @everydaysexism. This weaving together feminist art projects and feminist activism will allow us to to consider the ways in which feminist political aesthetics can contest, disrupt and activate alternative political imaginaries about sexual violence within public spaces.

LeeAnn Kahlor & Matthew S. Eastin (2011) ‘Television’s Role in the Culture of Violence Toward Women: A Study of Television Viewing and the Cultivation of Rape Myth Acceptance in the United States’ , Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 55 (2): 215-231

2-3.30pm: Discussion of essays (MA) and relevance to research (PhD and others)

Travel to Manchester

17.00 – 19.00: Sarah Schulman, Public Lecture

“Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair”

“It is not only that we may not choose with whom to cohabitate, but that we must actively preserve the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation; we not only live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve their lives and the plurality of which they form a part. In this sense, concrete political norms and ethical prescriptions emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of cohabitation.”

-Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

“Shunning is so often the go-to tool of people dealing with problems or conflict in queer communities, which only contributes to cycles of dehumanization and abuse. It’s the easy, simplistic response too often deployed for all manner of interpersonal and inter-community conflict.”